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Study: iPhone's social media mentions are off the charts

The folks over at eBay Deals have just wrapped up an extensive study of smartphone mentions across major social media platforms and their results show a clearly defined picture of just how much Apple's iPhone dominates social media mentions compared to its competitors. The study looked at mentions of smartphone brands and individual models across on Twitter and in YouTube comments.

For the Twitter portion of the study, eBay Deals took a sampling of 10,000 tweets, all containing the word "smartphone," over a ten hour period. While on the OS level, Android beat out iOS (being mentioned 558 times versus iOS's 295 mentions), "Apple" walloped other smartphone brands with 1533 mentions. The next closest brand was "Google" with 603 mentions, followed by "Samsung" with 360 mentions.

Further breaking the social mentions down by individual phones, "iPhone 5" lead the pack with 2,127 mentions--almost 10x the next most popular smartphone mention, the "Nexus 4" with 237 mentions. That's huge. The study also looks at other factors, such as Google Image searches, Flickr camera usage, and the emotions associated with YouTube "debates"--where fanboys argue it out in the comments.

The entire study is worth a read, but if you want the quick gist of it, eBay Deals have been kind enough to put all the results into a handy infographic, which you can view on the eBay Deals blog, or you can see an image of it here.